day 6: for fear

I wonder why you brought me

to these splintering days,

this age of dearth-death

and default extinction

and the smothering of constellations

nostalgia claws at me

screaming send me back

then I sense a fire that doesn’t consume,

a cloud of breath-taking holiness

passing across the face of a mountain

and it says

I put you here to see,

to see and hear and feel

the agony.

I needed someone whose heart would break,

who would fall to their knees

screaming

send me.

‘Prophet’

Gideon Heugh

Making room for fear is not the same as the mantra ‘feel the fear, and do it anyway’, though perhaps that is part of the courage needed for any spiritual journey.  It is about clearing space so that I can experience the full gamut of all there is to experience, so i can live and live all of it, meeting Emmanuel at the heart of every moment.

That may seem like a strange thing to want to do, since I have spent so much of my life being fearful.  I can see now that I let a fear of ‘getting it wrong’ dominate nearly all areas of my life.  Inevitably, the fear took over and I did indeed get ‘it’ wrong, over and over again.  I lost total confidence in myself, I hurt others, and more, I lost confidence in even the idea of there being a God who would forgive me, let alone love me..

Now, I test out whether I am going to live a fear-filled life or a creativity-filled one every time I turn up at the blank page or canvas, every time I put my art (and therefore my self) ‘out there’.  This year I have been really struggling with my faith in my ability to create work that will mean anything to anyone, work that expresses the visions I have in my head.  But all I can do is keep turning up and not letting the discouragement stop me, since it is such a potent force that wants me just to give up trying – trying anything at all.  It is hard to communicate how paralysing such a fear can be, how vitally painful and panic-inducing.  There is one pernicious thought that will nag at me, if I let it: f I lost the ability to create, wouldn’t I be worthless?

Gideon Heigh’s poem ‘Prophet’ (above) begins by describing my everyday small fear, the way I want to flee in the face of the ‘death-dearth and default extinction’.  It admits my agony; a much-too-muchness of helplessness; an inhibiting sense of scarcity; an overwhelming sense of my limitations, in the face of the ‘smothering of constellations’. 

Yet that same sense of vastness, and the need to let go of my tight control instinct, applies when I hear the voice of God as ‘a cloud of breath-taking holiness’.  I am paralysed by the majesty; until, suddenly, I am not: I am galvanised and propelled by the need to serve, with gratitude and hope.

Making room to fear, then, goes beyond experiencing an emotion, it even goes beyond experiencing a holy awe at the immensity of God, Creator of heaven and earth and everything in between.  The fear of the LORD, which the Old Testament mentions so often, is not a feeling.  The fear of the LORD is an energy that comes when I am still and quiet and small, when I admit all is overwhelm, when I glimpse an iota of grace, when I partially understand that that same immense, awesome God is becoming a God-with-Us.  At the very moment I admit how petrified I am of what that God-with-Us might demand from me, I am freed to act. I am freed to act with all of me, to live and love in the knowledge that though I can give little, and change the world even less, God meets me in what I can do, and makes it all so much more than I could possibly imagine.  Through time and space and from a very small corner of the internet, these words I write now might be exactly what a reader needs in one day, or a hundred years from now.  The true fear of the LORD moves mountains, as long as I will allow it to do its scouring work in me.

Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.

In the Upper Midwest, newcomers often receive a classic piece of wintertime advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Here, people spend good money on warm clothing so they can get outdoors and avoid the “cabin fever” that comes from huddling fearfully by the fire during the long frozen months. If you live here long, you learn that a daily walk into the winter world will fortify the spirit by taking you boldly to the very heart of the season you fear.

Our inward winters take many forms—failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them—protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance—we can learn what they have to teach us. Then, we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of all.

Parker J. Palmer 

https://fetzer.org/blog/winter-our-challenge-get-out-it

approaching storm. (iPhone image)